


centuries of dreams unending

by Solanaceae



Category: City of Hunger (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Artificial Intelligence, Darkest Night 2018, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Sexual Content, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 07:20:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16113566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae
Summary: Sigrun woke to the sound of an alarm blaring over the shipwide radio. She was in her bed, dressed in her unmarked black uniform, and this had all happened before.// Rewinding and repeating, or a story about endurance.





	centuries of dreams unending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elleth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/gifts).



> Thank you to Kiraly for helping with ideas/looking this over!

“You won’t get out that way, you know.”

Tuuri’s voice, layered with digital feedback and a strange, eerie humming noise, echoed down the hall. Sigrun gritted her teeth and focused on her efforts to pry the airlock door open. It wasn’t going very well, considering the fact that all she had were her bare hands.

A clicking of metal against the smooth floor of the hallway. She turned, abandoning her attempts at opening the airlock. Two spider-like automatons rounded the corner and advanced on her, each with eight red gleaming lights for eyes.

“These again?” she said, affecting a bored tone even as she planted her feet in a fighting stance. Truth be told, she was _really_ tired of getting shot at, and her gun had gotten wrecked by one of Tuuri’s force fields this time around, so she was rather short on options when it came to fighting back.

“Running away might be a good idea,” Tuuri suggested.

Sigrun charged.

The needle-thin laser sights tried to focus on her, one of them sending a chittering stream of bullets bouncing off the floor and bulkheads, but she moved too quickly—even as the bullets tore into her thigh, she launched herself at the robots. One punch to knock out the sensors, one to crush the thin metal carapace. The other tried to swipe at her with its clawed legs, but she swept its legs out from under it with her own leg, sending it clanging into the wall. Another punch finished it off.

She straightened up, breath coming hard. Her knuckles were bleeding, and the cloth of her pants was steadily darkening where the robot had shot her.

A wall panel sprang out, slamming into Sigrun’s side and crushing her against the bulkhead. She let out a shout of pain as her head struck the metal wall. Everything went blurry for a moment. As the world returned, she ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, where at least one of her teeth was definitely broken, and swallowed past the iron taste of blood that was quickly becoming all too familiar.

Slowly, the wall panel withdrew, letting her slump to the ground. There was a searing pain in her side—broken ribs, probably.

Overhead, a ceiling panel detached, and she saw the wide, flat head of a compressor descending towards her.

“Oh, Sigrun,” Tuuri sighed. “You never listen, do you?”

Sigrun closed her eyes.

***

“You’re Sigrun Eide? You’re so _tall_.”

Sigrun grinned down at the grey-blonde clerk. “I’m both of those, yeah. Is this where I’m supposed to come for my intake?”

“Oh—yes, I believe so!” The clerk hopped down off her stool, putting the book she had been reading face-down on the desk. Sigrun caught a glimpse of the cover—some technical manual. “I’m Tuuri, by the way.”

“Tuuri,” Sigrun repeated. “Nice to meet you.”

Tuuri stuck her hand out, and Sigrun took it instinctively, expecting a handshake. Instead, Tuuri turned and started pulling her deeper into the Bureau office. They wove between stacks of books and paper, some held down by paper weights and others by what seemed like whatever had come to hand first—a stopped clock, a flowerpot with two wilted stems sticking from its bone-dry dirt.

“So you’re an explorer,” Tuuri said, drawing to a halt by a stack of papers that looked no different from the rest. Sigrun supposed that all clerks at the Bureau must have some kind of magical ability to find _anything_ in this disaster of a place.

“Explorer, sure,” she said. It sounded a hell of a lot better than _mercenary_ , which was functionally what she was. “Yeah. Explorer.”

Rolling up her sleeve, Tuuri reached between two stacks of books, feeling around behind them. “Do you get to go to space?” she asked, voice somewhat muffled by the way her face was pressed against one of the stacks.

Sigrun felt her lips twitch into an involuntary smile. “Sometimes.”

Tuuri emerged from the pile with a slip of yellow paper, eyes bright with curiosity. “What’s that like? I’ve always wanted to go, but On—my brother never let me take any of the aptitude tests. He said it was too dangerous. _Is_ it dangerous?”

“It’s very dangerous,” Sigrun said proudly. “I’ve almost gotten killed. Several times.”

Tuuri’s eyes widened, but she looked even more eager (if that was possible) rather than scared. “ _Wow_.” She held out the paper, one side of which was slanted, as if it had been unevenly cut with a pair of scissors. “Well this is the official intake form, and then you can head over to Personnel Management and give it to them.”

Sigrun took the paper, skimming it—denial of liability, more legal stuff, blah blah blah—then signed at the bottom. She stuck the pen between her teeth, nibbling it thoughtfully, before saying, “Hey.”

Tuuri, who had been straightening one of the stacks of books, looked up. “Yes?”

“Before I hand this in and sign away the next three years of my life to the Bureau—” Sigrun waved the slip of paper. “Want to get something to eat?”

“Like, together?”

“Yes, together.” Sigrun smiled broadly. “Might as well spend the last night of freedom I have on something fun.”

Tuuri hesitated, then nodded. “Let me just close up here, and then we can go—my favorite bakery is just around the corner!”

***

Sigrun woke to the sound of an alarm blaring over the shipwide radio. She was in her bed, dressed in her unmarked black uniform, and this had all happened before.

She sat up slowly, each movement cautious. Nothing hurt physically—there were no bullet wounds or broken bones or anything—but her body ached with phantom pain, recollections of being hurt again and again.

Her memory was hazy. She did not know how many times this had happened. All she knew was that she was stuck, somehow, in a way that was hard to put into words. That the same things kept happening, each occurance steeped in itself until there seemed to be layers and layers of possibility to the bed, her clothes, the floor, everything.

A hum of static, and the alarm cut off, leaving the red lights flashing silently.

She pushed to her feet, crossed her room, opened the door. Outside, the hallway was dark, lit only by the intermittent red glow of the alarm system. Sigrun’s quarters were on the lower level of the ship. This was where she had been when this all started.

(When _what_ had started? What was happening to her, to the ship, to _Tuuri_?)

She swept the hallway visually—no sign of any robots, but Tuuri had cameras everywhere in the ship and was almost certainly keeping an eye on Sigrun. Not that Sigrun felt like much of a threat. For all the times this had happened, she only really had one idea. _Get to the command center._

She knew almost nothing about the inner mechanical workings of a ship this size, had really only ever been on one as a mercenary, but whatever was wrong was going to be there, in the beating heart of the ship. It was like fighting a space monster—once you opened a wound, you kept hitting that vulnerable spot until you killed it. Except in this case, the wound was already there, the open spot where the insides of the ship were most vulnerable.

In the absence of any immediately visible threats, Sigrun set off down the hall, keeping to the center of the passage so she would see any spring-loaded wall panels coming. Her gun was strapped to her side; she kept her hand close to it, just in case.

The first obstacle came when she reached the elevator to the second floor and found only an empty shaft.

“That’s fair,” she said to the listening air. “Better than when you spent an hour bouncing me up and down inside there.”

No response. It was like that sometimes. Tuuri would keep quiet and just… watch her struggle through whatever was thrown in front of her. With a sigh, Sigrun rolled up her sleeves and spat on her hands, then felt around the top of the open elevator doorway until she found a handhold. She pulled herself up and into the shaft. A cable dangled a few feet away, in the center of the space.

“If I grab that, will you drop an elevator on me?” she asked, reaching out and tugging on the cable, testing its strength. Satisfied, she braced her feet against the doorframe and pushed off, grabbing the length of woven metal. She dangled at the end of it for a few seconds, waiting for the swaying to stop, before starting up, hand-over-hand.

When the rumble of a moving elevator came from above her, all she could do was sigh.

“I guess I was kinda asking for that,” she mumbled.

The elevator hurtled down toward her. A brief moment of agony, then darkness.

***

It was snowing outside, fat flakes of white that drifted through the neon glow of the inner city. They caught in Tuuri’s long hair—she had undone her ponytail after locking up the office, and now her ashen hair flowed past her shoulders—leaving a glittering crown of frozen water around the shorter woman’s head.

The bakery turned out to be a small, comfortable place lit golden by the decorative lamps affixed to the walls that flickered, an artificial approximation of firelight. Tuuri ordered a chocolate cake for them to share, and they sat in a booth.

“Why do you want to go to space?” Tuuri asked. She sat with her pale hands laced together in front of her, the picture of attention.

_Money_ sounded a bit—well, not great. Sigrun cleared her throat. “I like fighting things.”

“Aren’t there things to fight here?”

Sigrun laughed, waving a careless hand. “I grew up hunting snow spiders. They’re no fun anymore. My parents were both hunters, so I spent a lot of time on the far side the mountain while they kept beasts away from the hydrothermal plants.”

Tuuri’s eyes widened. “You must be very brave, then.”

Sigrun grinned. “Yeah.”

Their cake arrived. Between bites, Tuuri told Sigrun about her own childhood—her parents were natives of the ice-bound planet, she had two brothers, both of whom had worked for the Bureau of Technology, in the active service branch.

“They have artificial parts now,” Tuuri explained. “Onni’s retired, he spends all his time studying to go back to school or worrying about us, but Lalli still does scoutwork for the Bureau.”

“So how did you end up pushing pencils for the Bureau?” Sigrun forked another piece of cake into her mouth, savoring the rich chocolate taste. The owners of this bakery must have some illicit connections, to be able to sell offworld products at such a reasonable price. There were certainly no chocolate trees (or whatever they were called) on this planet.

“Onni didn’t want me in the active service, he said it was too dangerous. I wanted to be involved _somehow_ , since the Bureau is the only institution that does off-planet work, and I thought that if I could at least see on paper what was going on, it would be enough…” Tuuri sighed, propping her chin in her hands. There was a smear of chocolate at the side of her mouth. “It’s more boring than anything else, honestly.”

“I’ve done a stint with the Bureau before, and space isn’t usually that exciting,” Sigrun told her. “You get sick on the shuttle going up, you sit around while they fire up the engines, you sit around while they fly you across the system, you sit around while they unload their cargo. Sometimes, you get to fight space monsters or pirates, but that’s not too often.”

“I want to see a space monster,” Tuuri sighed. “Have you ever seen one?”

“Of course I have.” Sigrun leaned forward. “They’re _so_ big, bigger than a cargo vessel, and they all look different, but they’re all very dark—someone told me they absorb light, but I don’t know exactly what that means—except for these little glowy bits. They blend in with the rest of space from far away, but if you get close…” She clapped her hands together. Tuuri jumped a bit in her seat. “They eat you.”

“How do you fight them?”

“You shoot them from far away, or, if it’s a very small one, maybe just the size of a building, so it’s too hard to hit with the ship’s guns, you send people out in spacesuits to fight it.”

“Did you ever do that?”

Sigrun nodded. “One time. It was a hard fight, and a lot of the other guards died.”

“But you didn’t die.” Tuuri considered this. “That’s good. Otherwise I’d have never met you. You have to promise to come back, alright? So you can tell me about all your adventures.”

Sigrun reached across the table and swiped at the corner of Tuuri’s mouth with her thumb, rubbing the chocolate frosting off. She brought it to her own mouth and licked it thoughtfully. “Of course I’ll come back,” she said, and winked.

Tuuri’s face flushed a delicate pink.

***

The alarm blared. Sigrun sat up, running a hand through her hair, and bit back a shout of frustration.

There _had_ to be a way into the command center. Coming in from the outside was impossible, since she couldn’t open the airlocks. The elevator shaft had proved to be deadly. The hallways themselves were booby-trapped and patrolled by robots. Tuuri had eyes and ears everywhere, even in the walls of this room, and she could see Sigrun in intimate detail.

_Think, you idiot,_ she told herself furiously. _What are you going to do?_

There had to be parts of the ship that Tuuri could not control directly. Parts that were partitioned off from the main system. There had to be _some_ kind of fallback in case of an AI gone rogue and murderous.

Her eyes fell on the ventilation grate at the base of the wall near her bed. Surely Tuuri didn’t have cameras down _there_.

She crouched by the grate and used a sharp bit of metal on the sight of her gun to slowly, painstakingly unscrew the four bolts that held it closed.

“Running and hiding, are you?” Tuuri’s voice crackled and hissed like oil in a hot pan. Sigrun clenched her jaw and kept unscrewing, wincing when she pinched her finger between the gun and the metal wall.

Finally, the cover fell off and clanged against the ground. Sigrun eyed the size of the opening—not big enough to keep her gun strapped to her, and it would be too unwieldy to push it ahead of her. Not that the gun had proved to be much help so far. She sighed, unbuckled her holster, and left it and the gun beside the bed before crawling in.

The passage was too narrow to turn around in, so when she heard the clatter of robot feet, all she could do was continue to pull herself forward, arm over arm, and hope that her mental calculations had been correct. When the telltale clang of the robot hitting the too-small opening echoed down the passage, she huffed out a laugh and kept crawling.

It took a long time for her to drag herself in the right direction, but several doubling-backs later, she elbowed the last grate out of her way and crawled into the command center.

The main lights were out, leaving the room illuminated only by the cool glow of the various screens and panels mounted on the walls. Her palms stung where she had scraped them against the rough floor of the passageways, so she pressed them against the cool glass. The panel flared to life under her touch.

“There you are,” Tuuri said. “Lost you for a bit.”

Sigrun’s lips curved up in a humorless smile. “My apologies. What inventive way have you decided to kill me today?”

“I’m curious to see what you’re going to do. Why come here, when you know absolutely nothing about how spaceships work?”

Sigrun shrugged. “Curiosity.” She edged towards the communications panel, which was mounted on a waist-high console that protruded from the wall. “Unless you want to give me a tour, I’ll just poke around for a bit.”

“Your heart rate is elevated. You’re up to something.”

Sigrun leaned against the communications station, feigning nonchalance that she knew Tuuri could see through immediately. “No idea what you’re talking about.” Out of the corner of her eye, she scanned the layout of the panel—speaker there, call button at the bottom.

“You know there’s no point lying to me. What—”

Sigrun turned and slammed the button to open communication, spinning the dial to a universal channel and shouting, “This is Sigrun Eide, Bureau ID 0058, transmitting an all-frequencies distress signal and requesting immediate assistance, repeat, _immediate assistance_.”

Tuuri sighed, the noise a rush of static. “Well played, Sigrun. Too bad it’s useless.”

The doors hissed open, the red-lit hallway sending pulses of light in, casting across the floor the shadows of the four spider-like robots advancing on her. Sigrun ducked behind the console just as they began shooting.

Her finger still on the call button, she shouted over the sound of bullets ricocheting off the walls and console. “Location marker is in standard encryption. Send someone in, _please_ —”

The console exploded into shards of glass and metal, scorching her hand and blowing her back several meters. The spray of bullets continued, now unobstructed, and Sigrun felt the bite of pain as they struck home.

This time, the bullets did not stop raining down on her. She fell into the darkness with gunfire ringing in her ears.

***

Sigrun walked Tuuri back to her apartment and kissed her goodnight under the bare lightbulb that buzzed in the entryway. It wasn’t a very romantic spot—the floor grimy, graffiti sprayed across the concrete walls—but Tuuri’s mouth tasted like chocolate, and she gasped when Sigrun’s lips met hers, then pulled Sigrun close so enthusiastically that they both almost toppled over.

The “kissing goodnight” didn’t quite go as planned, either, in that Sigrun ended up staying the night.

Tuuri proved to be very energetic in bed—and very vocal. Sigrun learned the spots that made her moan or arch her back or shape Sigrun’s name voicelessly in her mouth. For her part, Tuuri showed her a few tricks that Sigrun, who considered herself an accomplished lover, had never seen before.

After several rounds, they lay side by side in Tuuri’s small bed, tangled in sheets and pressed close together.

“Well,” Sigrun murmured into Tuuri’s hair, “if nothing else, I’ll have to come back for _this_.”

Tuuri laughed sleepily. “Glad I could convince you.”

Sigrun kissed her head, burying her nose in Tuuri’s dove-soft hair and inhaling the clean scent of soap and something smoky. “You make very good arguments.”

***

Something was causing the time loop, and something had made Tuuri turn murderous. Sigrun was willing to bet those two were one and the same.

Why had this happened?

She pondered this as she crawled through the ventilation passages—this time, she had torn the lower half of her military-issued shirt and wrapped the cloth around her hands to keep them from getting scraped up. She figured that there wasn’t exactly anyone around to chastise her for breaking dress code. And maybe her abs would distract Tuuri for a few vital seconds.

That last part was, admittedly, very unlikely.

She reached the command center and found it surprisingly empty. Cautious, she looked around. Nothing moved, except—was that a faint flicker of light, coming from the communications console? She squinted, trying to see—

The _incoming call_ light was blinking green.

She stared at it for a moment, dumbfounded, then scrambled to open the channel.

A voice, too distorted to be identified, came crackling in through the speaker. “— _to the spaceship Ki—position has been—transmissions may not—lost contact—”_

Sigrun slammed her fist against the side of the transmitter, cursing, then stabbed at the button. “This is Sigrun Eide, calling anyone who can hear.”

A thunderclap noise of static, then the green light flickered and died. But someone was out there, listening. They must have gotten her last transmission, which meant they were _outside_ whatever was happening here. Which meant there was a chance that they could be rescued.

A faint sigh, like air being let out of a balloon. Sigrun looked up to see a pale green mist seeping between the tiles of the ceiling.

“No,” she groaned, turning away from the console. “No, don’t do this—”

The cloud continued to descend—poison, she assumed. Why anyone would implement that as part of a security system, she had no idea. She rushed to the doors, only half-hopeful, and tried to pry them open. They did not budge, even when she nearly tore a fingernail off trying to gain purchase on them.

“Gods _damn_ it, Tuuri!” Sigrun banged her fist against the door. “There’s someone out there! This can all get fixed!”

Her next breath brought an acid burn down her throat and into her lungs. She doubled over, coughing, but each frantic inhale only increased the pain. She fell to her hands and knees, the suddenly airless world spinning around her.

The green haze slowly consumed everything.

***

The next time she saw Tuuri, the clerk had cut her hair short—part of it flopped over her forehead and into her eyes ( _adorable_ , Sigrun thought) and the rest of it was cropped close to her head. The first thing Sigrun did was run her hand through that part.

“You’ve got a fuzzy head now,” she told Tuuri, who smiled.

“I wanted a change. Do you like it?”

“I do,” Sigrun told her, and rubbed at Tuuri’s head to get it to stand on end. Tuuri ducked out from under her hand, laughing.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing Sigrun’s hand. “You have to tell me everything you saw in space.”

Sigrun let herself be pulled along, smiling.

***

How many times had this happened? How many times had Sigrun died, bullet-torn and choking on her own blood?

How many _more_ times?

The alarm was a familiar sound, and the silence after it cut out was more of a jolt than the blaring noise from the speakers. She sat up, movements automatic, mechanical. Unstrapped her gun. Rolled up her sleeves. Unscrewed the ventilation grate.

The door hissed open. She turned, expecting to see the business end of a laser sight, but there was nothing out in the hallway.

“What game are you playing now?” she asked.

Tuuri’s voice echoed down the empty hall. “Just walk there. I won’t do anything to you until you get to the command center. Promise.”

Sigrun narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“I don’t like the thought of you crawling around in me somewhere I can’t see.”

The spiteful part of Sigrun wanted to turn and crawl into that passage just to discomfit the AI. But she was so tired, and more than that—it was still Tuuri’s voice asking her to do something, Tuuri’s comfort in question. (And even after all the well-trod time that had passed, she still couldn’t disregard that.)

So she took the elevator up to the command center, and, true to her word, Tuuri did not drop her down the shaft or shake the elevator or greet her with bullets when the doors opened. It was almost unnerving.

The consoles were all lit up this time, bathing the room in multicolored light that reminded Sigrun of the neon lights and swirling snow she and Tuuri had walked through a lifetime ago. She walked a circuit of the room, hovering her hand over the screens as she passed them, noting each station: communications, spatial calculation, other things she didn’t know the names of.

The largest display showed a rippling field of purple surrounding the silver marker that denoted their ship. _Lightspeed Drive_ , read the glowing panel next to it. Above it was a glass case that housed a single red button.

Sigrun snorted as she drew to a halt in front of it. “Do you _seriously_ have a self-destruct button?”

“If you want to press it, be my guest.” Tuuri sounded almost bored. “Saves me the trouble.”

Maybe… maybe if _Sigrun_ was the one to do it, the loop would end. Maybe. Trying anything and everything really seemed like her only option, but still, some part of her hesitated.

The barely audible electric hum grew stronger as she lifted the glass cover, and the hairs at the back of Sigrun’s neck prickled as though Tuuri was leaning over her shoulder, watching.

She inhaled, then punched the button, hard.

The ship seemed to splinter under her hand, cracks of darkness opening across the floor. For a moment, she caught a glimpse of blurred light, long strands of star-like brilliance hanging like threads all around her, closing in at an impossibly fast rate.

***

Fact: Tuuri Hotakainen, former clerk for the Bureau of Technology and Extra-Planetary Service, was dead, and had been dead for almost two years.

Reports on _how_ she died tended to vary. From what Sigrun had heard, there were a few possibilities: that there had been a terrible workplace accident involving heavy objects or perhaps toxic materials, that Tuuri had been purposefully killed by the Bureau for finding out something she should not have, that Tuuri had willingly consented to her death and subsequent processing.

Tuuri herself, of course, did not remember—or if she did, she never told Sigrun so

Whether accident or murder or otherwise, the end result was the same: her consciousness was uploaded into a computer and put into service for the Bureau. Not for the personnel files and cargo shipment rosters she had been in charge of as a clerk—no, Tuuri’s new form was installed into a top-of-the-line spaceship as its core system.

Sigrun was out on assignment when Tuuri died, and so did not hear about the change until she returned home nearly six months after Tuuri’s death to find that the new AI had shipped out only days before Sigrun’s return.

***

The cyborg body standing in the hallway would have been beautiful in any other circumstance. Smooth artificial skin with delicate silver wires grafted over it, seamlessly joined limbs, a fluidity to the way it moved. One arm looked unfinished, the steel cables and copper wires and flashing electrical impulses laid bare, skinless.

Sigrun stood in the doorway to her room, blinking hard, wondering when the figure would disappear as a trick of her mind or—something.

“Sigrun,” Tuuri said, and her voice came from the body.

This was different, Sigrun thought, dazed. This… was definitely different.

“Do you like it?” Tuuri continued, spreading her hands. “I was planning on showing you for our anniversary, but this seems just as good. I’ve been working on it for a very long time.”

Common sense, honed by years of mercenary work and walking these handful of hours over and over, told her she should stay put. But her body moved as if by itself, stepping forward toward Tuuri, hand reaching up, drawn by some irresistible gravity towards the not-Tuuri that somehow _was_ Tuuri, after all this time.

Her hand brushed smooth, synthetic skin, and Tuuri shivered. Sigrun blinked.

“You felt that?” she asked.

Tuuri gave her a flat, blue-glow stare and stepped back against—no, _into_ the wall, her form disappearing into the metal bulkhead like water into a puddle.

“Wait,” Sigrun said, stepping forward. “Wait, Tuuri—”

Tuuri’s face was the last part to go. “See you next time,” she said, moments before the steel swallowed her.

Sigrun rushed forward, slamming her fist against the decidedly solid wall that Tuuri had just disappeared into.

A grinding of metal. Sigrun backed away from the wall as it began to move, the ceiling and the bulkheads collapsing inwards like crumpled paper.

_She felt it_ , she thought, and the thought was a pale flame in the darkness that swallowed her.

***

When she saw Tuuri’s AI identification code on the roster for one of the Bureau cargo ships, Sigrun put her name in the queue for that assignment and hoped. When her request was granted, it took a large amount of effort to not do a little dance of joy right there in the personnel office.

She rose bright and early on the day she was supposed to take the shuttle up to the ship. Approaching it was a strange experience—it kept getting _bigger_ , bigger than she would have thought possible, bigger than any ship she had served on before. It was a veritable marvel of engineering, all sleek metal and ceramic-carbon heat shields and quartz glass.

When she entered the airlock, she immediately felt the gentle buzz of the scanner sweeping her up and down, the black gleam of a camera’s eye swiveling to face her. She put on her most solemn face and said, “Soldier Sigrun Eide, reporting for duty.”

Tuuri’s voice, warm and familiar, emerged from the speakers hidden in the ceiling. “Sigrun. It’s nice to see you again.”

Sigrun couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face. “Same to you.”

The inner airlock doors hissed open, and Sigrun saw glowing arrows light up on the floor. “Your quarters are this way,” Tuuri said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you—I have access to _so many_ records now, you wouldn’t believe. I saw you got into a skirmish two months ago.”

“Yeah,” Sigrun replied, grinning. She rolled up her sleeve to display the parallel scars on her upper bicep. “They had some kind of modified snow spider. Really vicious.”

“Thought you said you were bored of hunting snow spiders?”

Sigrun laughed. “If all snow spiders were that much fun to fight, I’d have never left home.”

When they reached Sigrun’s quarters, Sigrun palmed the scanner beside the doors and they slid open. Her living space was a single room, furnished only with a standard-issue bed, a dresser, and a washing station.

She set her bag down on the bed and flopped down beside it, putting her hands behind her head and staring up at the ceiling. “I hear we’re headed to a planet that’s all desert,” she told Tuuri.

“I’ve never been to the desert. I’ve never really been off planet, except like this.” Was it Sigrun’s imagination, or was there a note of longing in Tuuri’s voice?

“I bet it looks stunning from up here,” Sigrun said. “Wish there were proper windows down here so I could see, too.”

A beat of silence. “I can project the view onto your wall, when we get close enough.”

Sigrun smiled. “Aw, thanks. What’ve you been up to all this time?”

“Classified,” Tuuri said, maybe just a little bit smug. “ _Way_ above your clearance level.”

“Tell me what you can about yourself, then,” Sigrun suggested. “What’s this ship capable of?”

“It has a unique and experimental propulsion system,” Tuuri said. “They think it’ll finally break the lightspeed barrier.”

“Oh?” Sigrun sat on her bed, propped her chin in her hands. “Thought that was impossible.”

“See, there’s always been _theories_ —” Tuuri launched into an explanation of quantum physics and warped space, sounding more and more cheerful the longer she spoke. Sigrun listened, nodding along, even when she had no idea what Tuuri was talking about.

It was almost like holding a conversation with Tuuri in that golden-lit bakery around the corner from her Bureau office. With her eyes closed, Sigrun could almost pretend nothing had changed.

***

Sigrun woke to a searing pain in her chest and Tuuri’s silver eyes inches from her own.

Somewhere overhead, the alarms were sounding, the red lights strobing across the ceiling, but it all sounded like a distant, humming whine at the edges of Sigrun’s hearing. Tuuri shifted, and Sigrun felt an answering tug of agony in her chest—Tuuri’s hands were _in_ her, steel fingers sunk in deep.

Sigrun sucked in a breath, heard a faint rattling in her lungs.

Something shifted in Tuuri’s silver-glow eyes, the bright glare dimming to a milder, flickering one. “Sigrun?” she said, and the strange static noise was gone from her voice, leaving only a strangely naked fear. “Sigrun, what—”

_Don’t do this_ , Sigrun tried to say, _don’t mock me like this_ , but hot blood bubbled up in her throat and she ended up coughing dark red across Tuuri’s face instead. Tuuri flinched, drew back—and looked down at her hands, buried in the bloody mess of Sigrun’s chest.

The horror on Tuuri’s face was too genuine. She sat back, fingers pulling free of Sigrun with an awful noise.

“Did I do this?” Tuuri asked, a note of pleading in her voice, like she wanted Sigrun to say _no, you didn’t, this isn’t real._

(Was it real? It was getting harder and harder to tell.)

Sigrun swallowed. Her silence and the obvious situation seemed answer enough: Tuuri’s face went slack, the silver wires in her skin flaring with electricity.

“Gods, Sigrun, I don’t—I didn’t mean— _I don’t know what’s happening to me_.” Tuuri’s mouth twisted with despair. “I don’t remember why, but I have to—I have to—”

“Tuuri,” Sigrun whispered.

“—there’s something _inside me_ , I don’t want to hurt you but I can’t stop—” Tuuri leaned forward. Reached out a hand that trembled in a shockingly human way. “Sigrun. You have to kill me.”

Sigrun shook her head so hard she was pretty sure she pulled a neck muscle.

“You _have_ to.” The ache in Tuuri’s voice, the helplessness, made Sigrun think that if Tuuri had been able to, she would be crying right now. Tuuri reached up to her throat and unlatched a panel, then took Sigrun’s hands in her own, brought them up to the opening. “While I’m still myself. I don’t want to hurt you again.”

_No_ , Sigrun wanted to tell her, but she couldn’t seem to make her mouth move. Almost instinctively, her hands clenched down. The wires shuddered under her fingers, like the frantic dying heartbeat of a snow spider. The world was starting to spin in a familiar way, and she nearly welcomed it this time.

But Tuuri was smiling at her, mouth moving, and though Sigrun could not hear her through the roar of blood in her ears, she knew what she was saying.

_Yes, keep going, Sigrun please keep going, I lo—_

Sigrun closed her eyes.

***

“Sigrun.” Tuuri’s voice emitted from Sigrun’s headset, the blinking blue light telling Sigrun this was a private channel between her and the ship AI. Given that Sigrun was alone in her room and not technically on duty, Tuuri was probably bored and in the mood to chat.

Sigrun was more than willing to humor her. “Yes?”

“I had an idea.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“I thought maybe we could—I could tell you to do stuff, and you could do them if you wanted, and we could, I mean, since I don’t have a body anymore for us to do—things—”

Sigrun grinned as she realized what Tuuri was implying. “And it’s a pity, because I loved seeing you in black lace. But I’m very much open to this idea as a replacement.”

“Good,” Tuuri said, then paused, which—Sigrun figured that at the rate computers worked, that one second of silence was like a minute of hesitation.

She spread her arms, raised her eyebrows suggestively. “I’m yours to command.”

“Take off your clothes,” Tuuri told her.

Sigrun felt a flush of warmth at the commanding tone in Tuuri’s voice. She reached up, undid the buttons at her collar, slowly removing her jacket. She paused, thinking, then folded it deliberately and lay it on the bed.

“Are you teasing me?” Tuuri asked. Sigrun suppressed a smile.

“Depends. Is an AI capable of being teased?”

She knew that was the wrong thing to say when Tuuri did not speak for several seconds.

“No,” Tuuri finally said. “I guess not.”

“Sorry.” Sigrun’s hands had been moving towards the hem of her shirt to lift it above her head; she slowly brought them back to her sides. “I didn’t mean to ruin the mood.”

“I can see all your vital signs,” Tuuri said after a moment. “I can tell when you’re tired, or angry, or aroused.”

Sigrun thought of all the times she had touched herself under (what she thought was) the cover of night, and felt a rush of heated embarrassment.

Tuuri must have seen _that_ , too, because she said, “I try not to pry too much. I don’t want to spy on you or anyone else. Just—if I want to, I can. But I don’t get any of that anymore.”

“Any of what?” This seemed important, somehow. Tuuri sounded almost upset. Sigrun sat down on her bed, crossing her arms over her chest. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I just—I can’t _feel_ things the way I used to. Emotions, I think, are the same as they were before—but I don’t know how I’d be able to tell, anyway.” Tuuri sounded almost unsteady. Sigrun felt an overwhelming urge to put her arms around the shorter woman, except there was no way to do that anymore.

She settled for putting her hand against the wall. “Tuuri—”

“I can’t _feel that_ , Sigrun!” Tuuri’s voice broke with frustration. “They let me keep all these emotions but I can’t feel _sensations_ anymore, I can’t touch you and I can’t ever feel the sun on my skin for real or the snow if I ever went back home, I’m trapped in this big metal _thing_ forever.”

“But you get to live forever.” Sigrun got the feeling she was digging this hole deeper the more she spoke, but keeping silent seemed like a bad idea too. “I mean, it’s a trade, right?”

“Did I make this trade? Or was it made for me?”

Sigrun’s breath caught in her throat. “Tuuri—”

“It’s fine,” Tuuri said, voice flat. “Stop feeling bad for me.”

“I’m not,” Sigrun said automatically, before remembering that Tuuri could tell she was lying.

The light on her headset blinked out as Tuuri severed the connection.

For several days, Tuuri did not speak to Sigrun outside of official channels. Even there, the orders she issued came in a frigid tone of voice that made Sigrun’s chest ache. She had messed up, and every curt word from Tuuri felt like a hammer driving the nail of her failure home over and over again.

She tried to make up, offering apologies, telling jokes, just _talking_ in hopes of getting a response. The silence she got in return seemed to grow heavier and heavier with each passing hour.

(At night, she touched herself, fully aware that Tuuri could see every movement of her fingers, every heartbeat, every half-swallowed gasp.

She climaxed with Tuuri’s name on her lips every time.)

***

Sigrun woke and lay still without opening her eyes, listening to the sound of her own breathing. Waited until the alarms cut out. Waited some more.

She had almost drifted back to sleep when Tuuri broke the silence.

“Sigrun.”

She kept her eyes closed.

“Sigrun, I know you can hear me.”

She hummed a noise of agreement. Opened her eyes. “Do you remember every loop?” she asked bluntly. “Do you remember how many times we’ve done this?”

An infinite pause. “I don’t,” Tuuri said at last.

“You should, if I remember at least most of it. Isn’t it all coded, your memory or whatever?”

“Sigrun, you have to get up.” Tuuri sounded as exhausted as Sigrun felt.

“Or what, you’ll come in here and kill me again?” She let her eyes drift closed again. “You’re welcome to, but I don’t think that’ll help. We’ve tried it _so many times_ , after all.”

“Whatever’s inside me, I can’t—I don’t know if I can fight it. I’m getting better at holding it off, but it always wins.” Tuuri sounded upset, but her voice was clear—none of the feedback or distortion that told Sigrun she was corrupted.

“Do you remember what you were doing right before this all started?”

“We were going to leave that binary system and heading for the next planet on the cargo list. You came up a day early from shore leave.” Tuuri paused. “There’s an incoming transmission.”

Sigrun sat up. “From who?”

“I don’t—it’s a Bureau callsign, but not one I recognize. I’m patching it through to your headset,” Tuuri said, and Sigrun grabbed her headset off the floor and shoved the earpiece in.

For a moment, only the faint background white noise, and then someone spoke, syllables clean and unhurried.

“ _Test is a failure_.”

Her heart stuttered, the sudden clarity of the voice over the radio unnerving. She adjusted the microphone and put her lips close to it, saying, “Please repeat—what do you mean by _test_?”

Static, then the voice came again. “ _Terminate immediately._ ”

Sigrun opened her mouth, meaning to ask, _terminate_?

Somewhere, a deep boom, followed by a roaring noise that grew closer and closer. Sigrun looked up to see the wall of white fire just before it swallowed her.

***

“I’m sorry, Sigrun.”

Tuuri’s voice cut through Sigrun’s dreams, lifting her from sleep into brief disorientation. Unsure if she had heard Tuuri speak or only dreamed it, she rolled over onto her side and looked up at the camera in the corner. “Tuuri?”

“I’m sorry,” Tuuri repeated. “For acting like a child.”

“Well, I’m sorry for being an insensitive idiot.”

Tuuri laughed, a soft burst of static. “So we’re okay?”

Sigrun nodded. “Of course we are.” A crooked smile tugged at her lips. “I can’t think of anything that would make me stop caring about you.”

***

“They’re trying to kill you.” Sigrun strode down the hallway, the black eyes of the cameras swiveling to follow her quick pace.

“Who? How do you know?”

“That Bureau ship that answered the distress signal.” She reached the elevator, hammered at the button with her fist. “Tuuri, I need to get to the command center, I need to—” She wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence, but the doors opened obediently. “How much longer can you hold on?”

“I don’t know. Five, maybe ten minutes. That’s the longest I’ve gone. But it’s harder if I’m not concentrating completely.”

So all those times Tuuri had gone silent—had she been quietly struggling to not kill Sigrun?

Before she could ask, the elevator accelerated upward, making her stomach lurch and forcing her to brace herself against the wall. When the doors opened, she hurried into the command center, all the lights flaring to brightness as she went. She crossed the room, pounding her clenched fist against her thigh. “Think,” she muttered, “you have to _think_.”

A small, illuminated panel that she had seen several times before caught her attention. _Lightspeed Drive._ She stared at it, wondering why her mind had snagged on it this time. That was what Tuuri had been talking about, that one time, about the experimental propulsion system.

Experimental.

Experiment.

_Test_.

She sucked in a breath, eyes widening, and she knew that Tuuri could see her vital signs, sense her surprise, but for the first time since this had all started she thought she had an idea of what was going on.

Five minutes, maybe ten. She didn’t have much time before Tuuri shifted, and she could not convince Tuuri to drop out of lightspeed if Tuuri was hell-bent on killing her in increasingly inventive ways.

“Tuuri, listen to me. It’s not you,” Sigrun blurted out. “It’s the Bureau. It’s a test. You need to drop out of lightspeed _now_ , before they blow us up again. I don’t know how many more times we get a do-over.”

Silence.

“Please,” Sigrun said, and her voice fractured. She swallowed, said, “I don’t care if I die. I really don’t. I just don’t want them to hurt you.”

The wall rippled, metal turning liquid for a moment, and Tuuri emerged.

“You said the lightspeed drive was experimental. Never been used before.”

Tuuri nodded.

“Is it possible that the drive could cause time to loop over and over?”

“I _guess_ —”

“And is it possible that the Bureau _knew_ that, and was setting this all up as a test? That they needed some sort of reset point, so they messed with your wiring, made you into something else that wanted to kill me?”

Tuuri nodded. “It’s possible.”

Sigrun touched Tuuri’s cheek, ran her fingers down the smooth artificial skin, and Tuuri shivered. Her eyes flickered, blue-silver-blue.

“I’ve hurt you so much,” she whispered.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Sigrun leaned down, pressed her forehead to Tuuri’s. “But we can end this.”

Tuuri closed her eyes, then whispered, “Terminate lightspeed drive.”

An answering trill from the console, which flickered, then went out.

The world stretched, everything tunneling away to a single, impossibly dark point. Sigrun kept her gaze on Tuuri’s face, the flower-like curls of silver wire, the suddenly clear blue glow in her eyes. All around them, the stars elongated, then snapped back into themselves.

They fell into the silver light together, still pressed together, and the last thing Sigrun felt was Tuuri’s hand in hers.

***

“Why _would_ you care about a machine?”

“You know, someone said something similar to me earlier today. I punched him.”

“I saw.”

“Right. I’m not going to punch you, if that’s what you were worried about.”

“I.. wasn’t worried about that, no. I’m genuinely curious.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“What if I’m not the same Tuuri you knew? Nothing about me is permanent. They can rewrite my code whenever they want. Make me something new, if they don’t like how I am. Maybe they’ve already done that, and I just don’t know.”

“Do you remember the night we met?”

“I think so.”

“All the neon lights and the snow and the cake?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still you, Tuuri. They haven’t changed you. I’d be able to tell.”

“But I’m not _human_ anymore. Artificial intelligence doesn’t get cake or—or snow or _love_.”

“Says who?”

“Love is only for—”

“Love is what you decide. Chemicals, electricity, whatever. It’s the choices you make. What’s your choice?”

“Sigrun—”

“Because I’m choosing you. I’m always going to choose you.”

***

Sigrun woke to silence. Lay still for a moment, limbs heavy with sleep and a deeper, more familiar exhaustion. Slowly, she became aware of a weight on the bed with her, depressing the mattress.

She opened her eyes to find Tuuri sitting at the edge of the bed.

“You’re awake,” Tuuri said.

Sigrun tried to sit up, but Tuuri put a hand on her shoulder, easing her back down with an inexorable force. “You need to rest.”

Sigrun made a face, but let Tuuri adjust the pillow behind her head. “Are you okay?”

Tuuri nodded, took Sigrun’s hand in hers. “When we dropped out of lightspeed, everything… went away. I remembered what happened.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.” A flicker passed across Tuuri’s face. “There was a program in a subfile that was triggered by entering lightspeed. The whole thing was just… one big test. They wanted to see what would happen, so they did it. They didn’t care about us.”

“Makes sense.”

Tuuri was quiet for a moment, then blurted, “Sigrun, I’m so sorry—”

Sigrun tugged her forward into a hug, cutting her off. “Didn’t I tell you it wasn’t your fault?”

Tuuri nestled her head against Sigrun’s chest. “I’m supposed to be the one taking care of you right now,” she mumbled.

“We take care of each other,” Sigrun said firmly. “Because we love each other. Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Tuuri kissed her, and her mouth was warm and tasted like firework smoke and fresh snow.

When they pulled apart, Sigrun smiled. “You know, we can do anything we want now.”

“The Bureau,” Tuuri said.

“Screw them. They couldn’t kill us, we can survive anything they throw at us.” Sigrun puffed her chest out a bit. “I can defeat them again, no problem.”

Tuuri laughed. “So what do you want to do?”

Sigrun thought for a moment, then said, “I hear there’s a planet that’s all forest. It’s supposed to be very warm this time of year. Lots of sunshine. Want to go there?”

Tuuri smiled.


End file.
